Swans on Tea

But for the people walking, this looks like a model railroad setup.
Tilt-Shift Trains Switzerland
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Atmospheric pressure is about 10 N/cm^2, but there are a whole lot of square centimeters on that tanker — the more familiar unit is N/m^2 (Pascals), where 1 atmosphere is 101325 Pa (or possibly even more familiar 14.7 psi).
Various sites showing this have claims [...]

Oh. I mean fractal ink
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Easter Island Panorama

Light Pillars
Typically seen in polar regions, the vertical columns of light have been appearing along with frigid temperatures at lower latitudes this winter.
Light pillars appear when artificial light or natural light bounces off the facets of flat ice crystals wafting relatively close to the ground.

Top Ten Waterfalls in the U.S.
Of these, I’ve seen Multnomah Falls and Niagra Falls

Light Transmitting Concrete
Litracon is a combination of optical fibers and concrete. A wall made of Litracon has the strength of traditional concrete but thanks to an embedded array of optical glass fibers, which lets in the view of the outside world, such as the silhouette of trees, or passersby, that are displayed inside the building.
The [...]

C’mon … we’ve all done it!
Just about anyone with access to liquid nitrogen has dunked things and smashed them.
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Back in June I wrote up a post an the Abraham-Minkowski controversy, which concerns the momentum of a photon when it’s in a medium.
Depending on the assumptions one makes, one can show that the momentum increases or decreases inside the medium, and obviously both solutions can’t be correct. But for a long time [...]

Freezebubbles
It’s very cold tonight, so we played with bubbles. If you blow them upwards enough they have time to freeze on the way down.
Damn. I wish I’d thought to do this when the temperature dropped to ~ 0ºF while I was home.

Tiny bubbles. Then bigger bubbles.
Here’s what happens when you add an antacid tablet to a big water drop in microgravity.
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The Shape of Alpha
Using Where-On-Earth geotagged photos uploaded to Flickr, one is often able to reverse-engineer maps, sometimes even at the neighborhood level.
Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? [...]